The Forever Watch (51 page)

This was the plan we decided on the day before. Karla will just have to deal with the changes I will make.

Better not to warn Barrens. He will see the opportunity and act without questioning it. He needs his mind clear, to finish this.

Karla has known for a while now of my abilities in using Archie to reconfigure the ship. She does not know how quickly I can do it, or how fine my control is. Or rather, she knew what I was capable of two weeks before. She knows the old limits. With Archie's growth, I have grown too. I signal my digital daughter. Where is the boundary between my intelligence and Archie's, anyway? We are so close, yet so different in the way we think. Hard to say. Harder now as I take leave of the plastech shell holding the last bits of organic life in my body together and ride the light.

While I am gone, Archie takes what's left of my body. Hopefully, she can fake being me to Karla's satisfaction, in case the tireless new captain should call. She always saw me as a tool anyway. Nothing matters to her as long as I fulfill my functions, directing her commands to the correct people, analyzing data, predicting trends—all things Archie can do just as well.

The huge amplifiers spread throughout the ship for simulating gravity are all essentially
touch
amps. They are designed to run the simplest of scripts—to exert a force in one direction resulting in a constant acceleration.

With my will in the driver's seat these massive machines are just another tool. I've been using amplifiers since the day I was that little girl in front of a mirror, wondering about my future.

Sensors manifest themselves from the plastech walls, and I put eyes and ears on this most dangerous of the remaining pockets of resistance.

The hall that Thorn travels through narrows. The walls themselves start to move. He and his followers cry out in fear. They try to stop it. Their puny individual talents are nothing to the great devices of the ship itself—through the Noah's Analytical Nodes, I can wield terawatt-class power now; if there were a million of these drug-boosted psychics, they might just barely touch the same amount of energy.

The corridor separates itself into ninety-one separate cages with hardened walls a meter thick, one for each prisoner. Each pounds the plastech in futility, calling out for his or her comrades.
Bruisers
break their bones against the armor. Telekinetics push themselves to the point of unconsciousness trying to take hold of the plastech and cut it. Telepaths cry out with their minds into the darkness, suddenly, terrifyingly alone.

I bore a path through leading from Barrens directly to Thorn's cell. The Enforcers in the side passages hear nothing, detect nothing; they do not realize their job is done.

I see Barrens start, almost drop the flask of water he was drinking from. He is not confused long. I watch resolve steel itself into the fine lines around his eyes, the grinding of his teeth.

Barrens reaches Thorn in an instant.

The slender, effete, handsome man has fared poorly on a diet of battles and fatigue and Psyn. The stylish clothes are rumpled and torn. Hair has fallen out. The eyes are bloodshot. His vibrant, melodic voice is gone to scratches and rasping. “I just wanted a future I chose myself. Shouldn't everyone get to choose that?”

My wolf, my lion, does not roar or growl. He speaks in a cold, soft whisper. “Thousands dead. Tens of thousands addicted. They'll need Deep Adjustments just to function. Enough reactor mass consumed to add hundreds of years to the trip.”

Shaking, trembling fingers light a cigarette. The spark of his
touch
is badly controlled, sears a lock of his hair, but Thorn pays no attention. “I always liked you. You're a good guy. Felt bad cutting you out. Problem was you are just too damned decent, Leonard.”

“I should just kill you.” Those lunch-box fists clench and glow.

Thorn nods. “I had a feeling it would end like this.” A twitching grin spreads across that hollow face. “But I know something you don't. 'Cause you didn't just smear me across the wall. So. You want to know it too.”

“Yes.” Barrens cocks his arm back. “The ISec Induction will kill me in response. But in that last moment, I will also kill you. This is how I deserve to die.”

Almost, I warn Leon to stop listening. Almost. But this is his choice. I won't make it for him … Although … Ah, it is selfish. Selfish. I need this.
Archie.

Before the thought is finished, the image of the girl in my thoughts is smiling even as I feel something change in me. Tendrils of information fire off into the Nth Web. I see them racing toward this dark place in the middle of nowhere, addressed to the inside of Barrens's head. They arrive at the same time as Thorn's telepathic thrust.

Barrens's hand flies forward, and the last of the resistance leaders dies with his skull smashed open. Without Thorn and the others Barrens assassinated, the single movement of thousands is merely so many little mobs without a unifying figure.

It is over.

Barrens leans against the ice-frosted wall and slides down. He presses his hands against his eyes. Thorn's last thoughts
write
through his mind.

“Why aren't I dead?”

“Archie removed the ISec termination code.”

His eyes pop wide. “Hana?”

The Builders had tricks of psionics that are beyond the human brain, even when augmented by a neural Implant. But I am not quite human anymore. And Archie can run the unfathomably complex matrix of psychic manipulations through the ship's processors. A body of energy projected remotely coalesces into the air, a more sophisticated expression of the same technique she used to make a beach and a sky, sand and waves, not quite illusion, not quite reality.

It is my self-image, the me when Barrens and I became whatever we are to each other. Better than that. I look healthy and vibrant with life. My legs and arms are strong. My cheeks have not withered down to the bone. My hair is almost luminous. I forgo the emitter plates on my face, so that he can see what I would have looked like without the metal. I wear a simple white sundress with sunflowers embroidered along the hem and stand barefoot and tiny and looking up at him.

His wide-eyed, mouth-open look makes a boy of him again, a teenager. It makes me laugh. The laughter does it, snaps him out of his shock.

“Hana!”

His embrace is hard. He is weaker now, from exhaustion. But still so strong. He lifts me up to him and it is a delight to feel my cheek against his without pain, even if his is scratchy and rough because he has not had time to shave in days.

“How can you be here?”

“I'm not really here.”

He tilts his head and frowns. Let's go, takes a step back and stares me up and down. Of course he is confused. He sees me, touches me, smells me.

“You sure look like you're here.”

I pirouette and enjoy the simulated sensation of the icy air around my legs, as the skirt billows out.

“It does look like it, doesn't it? It's something Archie picked out of the Builders' lost libraries of knowledge.”

His smile quivers. Perhaps he is noticing how I am not shivering, even if the air is below zero. Perhaps he can see that each of his breaths becomes a puff of icy mist, while I am not breathing at all. He sees that his bloodstained hands do not leave marks on my skin or my dress. He looks away for just a moment, wipes at his eyes.

“I guess I should thank her. Thanks, Archie.”

A young giggle in my head. Programs should not giggle. And she is not a program anymore, has not been for a long time.

I dart in and kiss Barrens, and the taste is everything he remembers. We can both pretend, for a while.

I think it, and the ship warms the air. Above us, the gray ceiling is hidden by the imagery of clear blue skies. There is a sun. There is a breeze. Under our feet, the floor becomes grass. It is still plastech, but it is green and soft and feels like the real thing. We sit and lean against the wall and hold the moment tight.

Our hands touch. We chat. As though thousands of people have not died in the time we have been together. Because of us, in spite of us.

It cannot last. The deck structure under the pseudo-soil and grass vibrates and whines. We hear echoes in the distance. The grinding moan of Enforcers starting to burn their way through. My sunny day flickers.

These summer seconds are almost over. Far, far away, Archie lets me know that my body's functions are crashing. I do not know what will happen next—if this death will end me and I will just fade away, or if I will continue on, as something else. I wonder if souls are real, and if I lost mine as my brain cells were replaced with infinitesimally small machines.

Leon presses his lips to my cheek for just a second. He asks me, “Do you know?”

“I don't.”

“Do you want to?”

“Why not?”

Our foreheads touch. He encapsulates the truth in data, from brain to Implant to the ship, and from the ship's systems to me.

I see the glorious white-and-blue ball of Canaan, floating in the black. It has a reddish moon. It is slightly smaller than Earth.

“It is what it is,” he whispers to me. “I guess it has to be enough. This is what lies in store.”

The Noah, a majestic, massive winged white bird manifests out of the emptiness of space. It enters orbit. And then …

The isolated package, the irregularity hanging from its belly, all square angles and ugly pipes, completely unlike the smooth, living curves of the Builders' making, detaches. It enters the atmosphere, riding down on a column of blue telekinetic force.

When it lands, thousands of coffins in a dark chamber open. Men, women, children. Waking up.

The Noah itself leaves orbit. It turns away and begins to pick up speed once more. It plunges into the sun.

We're just automata, programs with bodies keeping the ship going until we aren't needed anymore.

Those chosen people in the Ark, they get to wake up, rebuild. The last uninfected humans from Earth get to paradise. We aren't allowed. The disease, Mincemeat, the whole cursed cycle, the social order with Keepers and ISec and Behavioralists and Breeding Duty, dies with us.

Through him, I experience thirdhand the emotional contamination that spread among Thorn and the others. Arguments. Everything that came after. The battles. The sheer burden of knowing. A number wanted to just blow themselves to bits and did, taking as many others with them as they could. Others wanted to jettison those sleeping survivors in the Ark—to have our descendants, G-0s and G-1s, doomed people and monsters together, try to make something of it on the new world.

So close. It had been so close. ISec shut the Nth Web down just before the Archivist leaders would have broadcast this terrible truth across the Habitat.

There was no anger left in Thorn in that last split second, calmly waiting for his skull to be smashed open. Just confused sorrow—the downfall of his ideals, the bitterness of a reality more harsh than his most pessimistic moments of cynicism. So much like what Barrens feels too. Only for my lion, he can imagine a future where humans walk on soil again with a real sun above them. Even if it is not for the likes of us.

“It is worth it,” Barrens whispers, “isn't it?”

It has to be.

I show him what I have seen in the Habitat. People are living again, unconcerned, maybe even happy, despite the unfeeling Adjusted dolls among them. The rebuilding is going well under Hennessy's direction. I show Barrens my darkness too, those times when I watch my son, twisted, ropy limbs of muscle, all eyes and fangs, sleeping in his amniotic cage, inside that other city, squirming in nutrient slime, moaning and wailing in nightmares. My secret wish, that unspoken thought when Karla told me I was dying, to end myself there, to not face the pain, to end it cleanly.

If we have to choose between hope and despair, we might as well choose what lets the species survive.

This is how it ends for him and me. We don't say we love each other, and we don't say good-bye. There is the way we embrace hard as we can. Here, we kiss our last kisses, put everything there is of us into it. Good and bad. Nights and days. Countless flashes of memories pass back and forth between us, sensations, emotions, our shared history reexperienced.

I feel it all at once, the sensations walled away in that bleeding, broken thing. A slow sinking into a deep pool of still water. The convulsive twisting. Systemic organ failure. Despite all these upgrades, in the end I'm just meat, just like everyone else. The false body begins to flicker in and out of existence in Barrens's arms.

There is a last surge of fear.

Archie, too, realizes she is losing me. Her panicked blips and tweeting whistles, her psionic manipulations, none of these things can stop what is happening.

Far away, I feel Barrens scream my name.

I stop—

 

 

Karla's rank as Ship's Captain becomes official and permanent. She consigns my corpse to an isolated research lab under the highest levels of security. She commands the mission with an iron heart and erases from her thoughts the dream of trying to find a cure.

Jazz is Retired a year after the Mincemeat crisis. I watch over her dying moments. I think she senses me, for just a moment, before she passes on.

Marcus dies two years after. When he does, Lyn throws herself into her work and practically dwells on the Bridge. She spends the rest of her life trying to unravel Archie's mysteries.

Hennessy sometimes recalls his old boss, a woman that helped him get promoted, who loved his fancy sandwiches and never did get around to telling him about what Barrens does in bed. James runs the logistics for the entire ship now, only a little less efficiently than I ran my part of City Planning. Once in a while, he flirts with Barrens, who never gets comfortable with the attention.

Barrens expects to be Adjusted. At the least, to have some memories erased. Neither happens, and no one ever explains why. He suspects that what he remembers and his conflicted service as the Minister of Peace is better punishment than what Karla can invent.